How to polish headlights by hand | Car headlights polishing

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Yellowed headlights that lose transparency

All headlights will lose transparency when aging and have a less transparent but also yellowed lens.
You can easily bring them back to a shine that is almost like new ones by rubbing them by hand with a widely available abrasive compound.
See below for pictures and details.
DISCLAIMER:
Our pictorials are of informative nature and do illustrate works carried out by ourselves at our own premises for our own use and satisfaction.
Readers who envisage to carry out similar works inspired by the below method shall do this at their own risks and liability.

How to polish headlights and bring them back to transparency

Use any abrasive rubbing compound that is specific to headlights or the one used for car paint and proceed as follows:
  1. Using a cotton wad from a polishing cotton roll, spread the compound on part of the headlight
  2. Do not cover the whole headlight, work on one small area at a time.
  3. Push hard on the cotton pad and apply linear movements then alternate with small circular movements in order to buff well the headlight 
  4. You need to apply some force for the headlight polishing to work
This picture shows how to apply circular movements when rubbing the headlight lens.
Buffing before the headlight polish compound dries gives better results than after it dries.
Leave the polish to dry then wipe it of with a clean cotton wad and you will already notice a difference in the headlight transparency.
You will need however to repeat the headlight buffing with more polish around 10 times to obtain satisfactory results.
The below pictures show how the headlight lens transparency is being progressively restored from pass to pass.

Buffing (padding) the car headlight with a polisher

You can consider a last pass with a polisher and a polishing pad in case you own one.
This will bring the headlight to a perfect shine but this is not mandatory.
The results are already satisfactory by the only rubbing of the hand.

Restored headlight lenses

With patience, you will end up restoring your headlights to a near new shine and transparency.

Buy your headlight lens restoration kit here:

See also our comprehensive tutorials for car maintenance: